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You knew John Sculley as the big-company guy who corrupted the soul of Apple Computer Now he's just another fella doing start-ups BY JERRY USEEM
SCULLEY HAS SPENT HIS CAREER king his way down the corporate food st he was a divisional president of billion PepsiCo. In 1983 he quit to n much smaller Apple Computer. Forced out after 10 years there, he landed at Spectrum Information Technologies, a fledgling public company that turned out, essentially, to be a charade. So he went smaller still and in 1995 joined Live Picture, an Internet-imaging start-up with all of five employees.
And it's there, at the smallest of the small, that he claims he's found true happiness. "If there were the kind of entrepreneurial opportunities there are today when I was starting out," he declares, "I never would have gone to a large company in the first place." He even sounds convincing.
That may come as a surprise to most people, since these days it's not fashionable to say much of anything that's charitable about John Sculley. When his name is invoked, it's usually to pillory him for an array of presumed offenses that range from Apple's present death spiral to his own pretensions of technoenlightenment.
More to the point, his latter-day career is often characterized as a sort of Greek tragedy of the Oedipus at Colonus variety: the onetime king, overflowing with hubris, forced to wander the wilderness in a series of humbling misadventures. "My goodness, what has happened to him?" one business publication recently jabbed, describing Sculley's demeanor at a public appearance as "cadaverous" and "gasping for respectability." It would thus be easy to dismiss Sculley's avowals of love for small companies as so much self-serving spin control, an attempt to recharacterize a very precipitous fall from the corporate heights. But Sculley, 59, seems genuinely invigorated. "I've probably never been in better health and had more energy than I have right now," he says at his home in Maine, sounding anything but cadaverous as he squeezes in a little sailing between biweekly trips to the West Coast. And he's been putting his money where his mouth is, too, by backing small companies through his own venture firm. Talking about Sirius Thinking, one of the...